“A Teetering Giant”

That’s how the National Park Service (NPS) describes Balanced Rock in Arches National Park. One of the park’s most iconic features, this giant towers 128 feet above the desert floor.

The balancing act is an illusion. This 3,600-ton slick rock boulder of Entrada Sandstone sits precariously atop an eroding pedestal of Dewey Bridge mudstone. Eventually, gravity will prevail, and the boulder will come tumbling down.

Erosion toppled Balanced Rock’s smaller sibling “Chip-Off-the-Old-Block” in the winter of 1975-76. You can view this and other Arch’s events on the NPS’s Then and Now page. As the Park Service says, “…there is no better time than the present to see this awe-inspiring giant.”

The Shot

My very first photography trip was to Arches in 2006. It included a nighttime session at Balanced Rock, but I did not come away with a usable image. Photographing at night turned out to be a daunting task.

I had better luck in 2011 when I returned. I was able to capture a very simple nighttime image.

My Meh 2011 attempt.

But I yearned to do better. And that chance came on June 16 when I was back in the park.

I photographed the foreground and Balanced Rock during twilight. A technique called focus stacking allowed me to create a sharp image from the leaves inches in front of me to the distant sandstone formations. Passing cars in the distance provided beautiful soft lighting for the formation.

As I mentioned last week, all of us on Earth are rotating. This means that long exposures at night produce streaky stars rather than pinpoint stars. To counteract the rotation, I used a star tracker that moved my camera in sync with the Earth’s rotation to cancel out any streaking.

The tracker also allowed me to take longer Milky Way exposures at a lower ISO setting, reducing the noise in the image. In addition, I blended sixteen 30-second sky images in Photoshop to reduce the noise even further and to bring out more detail.

With my camera dialed in and taking pictures, I leaned back in my camp chair and thoroughly enjoyed the night sky. I felt privileged to be able to return to Arches and capture a nightscape that had eluded me on two earlier trips to the park.

Thanks for looking,

Chuck Derus Zenfolio | Chuck Derus